I think people who complain about paid DMs don't really appreciate the work involved in setting up a nice VTT adventure. Because of the pandemic our group switched to VTT and it easily doubled my pre work. The entire social / personal aspect is significantly suffering under video and voice chat so I put way more effort into maps, tokens, background sounds, ambient music and thematic art than I would for a "normal" session. All of this stuff must be found / bought / created, uploaded, prepared for the VTT in question. Then there are the technical issues. Linking D&D to Roll20 or Foundry is super-easy, thanks to the Beyond 20 integration. But we're also playing other RPG systems and writing a custom game system / character sheet for a VTT software takes days or even weeks of work, not just a few hours.
All in all for a typical 5 hour session I have easily the same amount of time for prepwork with the VTT. And most of the art and music isn't available for free, either. Since march I've probably spent 500$ on this stuff and Dndbeyond and Roll20 alone cut 20$ a month out of my budget to share the content.
I obviously don't charge anybody for it, since I'm playing with real life friends, but I can totally understand that a professional DM would charge something like 30$ per person per session. For a typical session with four people that'd be 120$... so 12$ an hour for the 10 hours of total work. For a gig that's not nearly enough to make a living on, unless you have a gig every single day, but how many people are there who hire DMs for such a steep price?
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I think people who complain about paid DMs don't really appreciate the work involved in setting up a nice VTT adventure. Because of the pandemic our group switched to VTT and it easily doubled my pre work. The entire social / personal aspect is significantly suffering under video and voice chat so I put way more effort into maps, tokens, background sounds, ambient music and thematic art than I would for a "normal" session. All of this stuff must be found / bought / created, uploaded, prepared for the VTT in question. Then there are the technical issues. Linking D&D to Roll20 or Foundry is super-easy, thanks to the Beyond 20 integration. But we're also playing other RPG systems and writing a custom game system / character sheet for a VTT software takes days or even weeks of work, not just a few hours.
All in all for a typical 5 hour session I have easily the same amount of time for prepwork with the VTT. And most of the art and music isn't available for free, either. Since march I've probably spent 500$ on this stuff and Dndbeyond and Roll20 alone cut 20$ a month out of my budget to share the content.
I obviously don't charge anybody for it, since I'm playing with real life friends, but I can totally understand that a professional DM would charge something like 30$ per person per session. For a typical session with four people that'd be 120$... so 12$ an hour for the 10 hours of total work. For a gig that's not nearly enough to make a living on, unless you have a gig every single day, but how many people are there who hire DMs for such a steep price?